Author Archives: morgan

What I’m reading 15 Jun 2018

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  • Trump’s Genius Is His Entertaining Idiocy | The Nation – > Trump’s genius for distraction, self-pity, and entertaining idiocy succeeds not only in normalizing his psychopathic behavior and malevolent prejudices but also in hiding the fact that institutions that protect our freedom and democratic rights are teetering beneath a ferocious assault. We fiddle; they burn. – (trump fascism )
  • Trump Is Making Us All Live in His Delusional Reality Show – Resist. Live in truth.

    > We live in a lie now, perpetrated from the very top, enhanced by relentless propaganda, and designed to shore up what is a cult. It is growing in strength. It is precisely now that we must manage at every moment to dispel it. And then to vote, en masse, for its extinction. – (rhetoric resistance fascism trump )

Breakfast at the 209 Bar

This is the new stuff. The truck-stop colonized by the urbanites.

The atrium roof is appealing. You look up a lot. The breakfast bar is loud. The ambience is ritalin-driven. The food is laced with peanut-butter, bacon, and cheese. Cosmopolitan effort. And we feel vey cosmopolitan here. Situated. Groomed. Boys and girls bathrooms, the design ripped from the metro airport. Stainless steel baby changing platform. A common washing space, like a circular urinal. Or font. Or locker rooms. An after-bacon rendezvous. We first held hands in the over-spray at the breakfast bar. A grandparent playlist: Bowie as Ziggy, Blind Faith, Led Zeppelin II. No one’s listening. They are missing the better irony of the morning. Looking up into the atrium’s blue sky.

Simonson’s beats the space for a relaxing breakfast, formica and tippy tables. Top of the heap for desperation.

Getting out was a reprieve. Quieter outside than in. Like leaving a snow-mobile factory for a summer’s day.

What I’m reading 28 May 2018

  • [toread] Trump’s bizarre understanding of Capitalization is surprisingly Strategic – The Washington Post – Set aside the idea that it had to do with monetary capitalization.

    > Initial capitals make words and ideas seem Really Important. They are to meaning-making what flag pins are to patriotism and gold-plating is to value — cheap signals of depth and quality that are somehow taken seriously by enormous numbers of people. (How seriously? There’s not one but two PolitiFact articles dedicated to discussions of Obama’s pin philosophy.) This capitalization technique is common in get-rich-quick and quack medicine books desperate to sell readers on the Truth of their claims. – (rhetoric linguistics trump capitalization )

What I’m reading 21 May 2018

  • Trump Only Has One Scandal – The Atlantic – Slouching towards Bethlehem. The act of fascism gives way to grounds of fascism.

    > There are not many Trump scandals. There is one Trump scandal. Singular: the corruption of the American government by the president and his associates, who are using their official power for personal and financial gain rather than for the welfare of the American people, and their attempts to shield that corruption from political consequences, public scrutiny, or legal accountability. – (trump corruption rhetoric )

What I’m reading 21 May 2018

  • Trump Demands an Official Investigation of Obama White House – The Atlantic – Trump found a loophole. Now he needs to find a few corrupt friends will to drive through it for him. But the story is in the interpretation of the tweet: – how the doj interprets “look into.”

    > This is a nakedly corrupt attempt on the part of the president to discredit and derail an investigation of himself at the expense of a human intelligence source to whose protection the FBI and DOJ are committed. My colleague at Lawfare, Quinta Jurecic, and I fleshed out the history of this saga and warned, “Don’t underestimate this episode. It will have a long tail and big consequences—all of them terrible.”

    > The idea that the president doesn’t interfere in law-enforcement investigative matters is one of our deep normative expectations of the modern presidency. But it is not a matter of law. … The only real restraint on the president—other than his own conscience and political pressures—in dipping down into the FBI and Justice Department and directing investigations for his own personal purposes is the willingness of senior law-enforcement officials to carry out improper orders. – (trump rhetoric hermaneutics )

What I’m reading 19 May 2018

  • Rebecca Solnit: The Coup Has Already Happened | Literary Hub – Anxiety arrives.

    > After the coup, everything seems crazy, the news is overwhelming, and some try to cope by withdrawing or pretending that things are normal. Others are overwhelmed and distraught. I’m afflicted by a kind of hypervigilance of the news, a daily obsession to watch what’s going on that is partly a quest for sense in what seems so senseless. At least I’ve been able to find the patterns and understand who the key players are, but to see the logic behind the chaos brings you face to face with how deep the trouble is.

    > We still have an enormous capacity to resist the administration, not least by mass civil disobedience and other forms of noncooperation. Sweeping the November elections wouldn’t hurt either, if that results in candidates we hold accountable afterward. Or both. I don’t know if there’s a point at which it will be too late, though every week more regulations, administrators, and norms crash and burn—but we are long past the point at which it is too soon. – (trump )